Peter Oborne's latest dispatch reads like George Bernard Shaw on Stalin's Russia.
Peter Oborne’s latest dispatch reads like George Bernard Shaw on Stalin’s Russia
The humanitarian disaster that engulfs Syria continues to be an object of media fascination. Journalists in the West, whose families are not threatened by government militias or gangs of jihadis, postulate and probe the situation from a distance.
The impetus for intervention has passed, and so the media consensus, ever fluid to the needs and wants of readers, has shifted. Now newspapers seem to be content to gawk at the hideous and seemingly unsolvable violence, and commentators are happy to broadcast the comforting inanity that we were right to stay out of the conflict.
The most recent example is the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne: a political columnist who has been uprooted and dropped into the most violent and bloody nation in the Middle East. Consequently, he does not leave the relative safety of Damascus, and produces his copy from a government district. In doing so, he is safe from the fighting, and, it appears, the facts.
Let us review those facts. Peter Oborne, who has not seen any rebels, or travelled to any rebel areas – summarising the inherent weakness of his reportage with a single, breezy clause: “I have not spoken to the opposition” – manages to draw an entire article, a thousand or so words in length, from a single, unalterably biased viewpoint.
In his conversations with the citizens of a government controlled region, he manages to turn propaganda, by some feat of factual transfiguration, into ‘truth’.
And why shouldn’t he? After all, it fits the narrative he is trying to create, one in which President Assad – a thuggish, brutal dictator, whose forces have been described by Philip Luther, director of Amnesty International’s Syrian activities, as “committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war” – is a nice man who occasionally gets stuck in traffic jams.
Oborne, who despite this episode, remains a journalist I respect immensely, should not be allowed to get away with writing the following nonsense: “I am well aware that the government has committed dreadful atrocities, though I suspect that some of the accounts have been exaggerated.”
In a single sentence, in which he introduces no supporting evidence, no new insight of note, Oborne denigrates the tales of outrages committed by the government.
But, without reference to someone credible, or serious investigation from the man himself (of the sort that, had it occurred, Oborne would not exactly shrink from detailing for the public) this utterance cannot possibly stand up.
Oborne slavishly, and masochistically, repeats the propaganda that the President, head of a government which has used chemical weaponry, possibly multiple times, on civilian areas, can sometimes be seen driving to work from his “relatively modest flat”. Is it too hard to suggest that this story – one of a particular genre: many a Soviet poster showed the unassuming way in which Stalin spent his days -might have originated from, or been supplemented by, one of the minders who accompanied our hero for “much of the time”?
But the worst error Peter Oborne makes is one of classification. He suggests first that there are “no ‘good guys'” in Syria. That is utter rubbish: there are no good guys if we only count the regime and the religious fundamentalists. There are secular democrats in Syria, and, because of the prevalence of those mentioned previously, they need our support. Oborne’s thinking discounts, and does a major disservice to, the Kurds, for one thing.
It is not a zero sum game between the mullahs and the government murderers, and it is both foolish and misleading, for someone in Oborne’s position especially, to suggest otherwise.
All the while, the crisis is not stopping. There is no winding down of the violence and horror; not because those in the West have other things to worry about, in Ukraine and elsewhere, and certainly not because Peter Oborne suddenly appears to back Assad.
Meanwhile, out of the bounds of this sub-academic speculation, the deadline for the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons hoard is running out. The number of total refugees from the conflict has passed the 2.5 million mark. At the beginning of this year, the UN even suspended the counting of the dead, such is the virtually unimaginable scale of this tragedy.
That cannot be dismissed with a glib line or two about the nastiness of all those Islamists Peter Oborne has never met.
This article ought to serve as a warning. This sort of writing occurs when commentators masquerade as war correspondents, and when right-wing, isolatinist ideologues masquerade as unbiased journalists.
James Snell is a freelance journalist
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35 Responses to “Peter Oborne’s latest Syria dispatch is a disgrace”
robertcp
I do not think that there are many ‘good guys’ in Syria and the awful Assad regime would not have survived unless it had some support. Our priority should be a negotiated end to this civil war.
Mike Stallard
Isn’t the problem one of religion?
President Assad and his family are of one kind of Islam and the vast majority of his people – except the security forces – are of the other.
Saudi is on the side of the vast majority; Iran is on the side of the President and the security forces.
Russia is traditionally on the side of the Iranians and the USA sees the rebels as freedom fighters who are fighting for democracy, freedom and the American Way of Life.
I think myself that the USA have got it very badly wrong. I also think that Russia have got it very badly wrong. This is a religious war. President Assad is fighting desperately for his very life. The rebels are fighting gallantly for their place in paradise and their very lives too. Both sides are vicious and ruthless killers.
Christians, of course, are fair game for everyone. Shame really. I am a Catholic myself. Syriac Christianity is very old indeed and we used Iranian incense this week at Mass. But – hey – who cares about Christianity! The National Secular Society would have quite a lot to say about all this.
In no way ought we to get involved. And when the Jihadis come back home to England, they ought to be watched very carefully. This must in no way involve our secular society. We have already done our wars of religion.
septicisle
I suspect the author’s real problem with Oborne’s report which he naturally doesn’t address is that it sets out something hardly any Western correspondents have engaged with: that despite everything, Assad seems to both retain significant support and has not been overthrown ala Gaddafi or scuttled away as Ben Ali and Mubarak did. This can’t be explained purely as being down to the undoubted brutality of the Ba’ath, or out of fear at what the opposition might do should they seize power; it’s because a certain section of the Syrian people supported him when the protests broke out and continue to do so now. You can accuse Oborne of naivety for repeating fairytales about Assad driving to work as if there isn’t a war, but that doesn’t detract from his setting out a position barely given any thought elsewhere.
Alec
Do you not remember how Gaddafi was overthrown? Plus, Ben Ali and Mubarak’s countries were heavily reliant on US input, so their Generals had an interest in getting rid of them.
~alec
Yohan
I find it very strange for someone like James who probably never been anywhere near Syria to mount such unjustifiable attack on Peter who has just come back from Damascus and witnessed the brutality of the so-called freedom fighters.
I studied Arabic in Damascus for a whole year and have travelled throughout Syria. I have never seen happier people during my stay, and if that says something, it definitely is for the credit of Assad who had given his people free education, health and many other amenities which we have to pay for here in the west.
I fully agree with Peter that this is a Wahabi Jehadist war waged by the like of saudi Arabia, qatar and turkey to destroy the harmonious secular mosaic that is Syria and divide up into religious states that justify the existence of israel.